The Oxford sex-grooming case reveals the glaring failures of our
child-protection system

Most of the coverage given to the case of the seven men found guilty of the appalling physical and sexual abuse of underage girls in Oxford has focused on the fact that most of these monsters were of British Pakistani origin. But what should be seen in its own way as even more disturbing is the fact that five of these six girls were in the care of our “child protection” system.

Not only did the social workers consistently refuse to protect these children from hideous abuse over eight years – one 12-year-old girl’s parents pleaded in vain with them to intervene more than 70 times, another mother rang social services to report her daughter missing more than 100 times – but social services also actively connived in it, as when one care home bought a 13-year-old child “sexy underwear”, before sending her out to be drugged with heroin and gang-raped.

Almost identical was the case of those British Pakistanis from around Rochdale, jailed last year for similar offences against underage girls, most of whom were also in care. In Parliament, Simon Danczuk, Rochdale’s MP, quoted health workers who told him that the social workers had refused to intervene “because they believed that the girls had been making life choices, which was why they were seen as prostitutes”.

But these and other similar cases are only the most lurid examples of how our “child protection” system has gone so catastrophically off the rails that, by the law of “dark inversion”, it far too often does precisely the opposite of what it was set up to do. Again and again, in the scores of cases I have followed where social workers, supported by the police and the courts, have seized children from loving parents, I have been struck by how often these unhappy children are then subjected in “care” to abuse far worse than anything alleged against the parents from whom they were removed.

Most disturbing of all is the way this is covered up and ignored by politicians, the BBC and all those who continue to pretend that the system is working as intended.

Last year, when that Rochdale MP disclosed shocking details of his local scandal in the Commons, this was during a long debate calling for social workers to be given even more support in their holy task of breaking up families.

Neither the two ministers present nor a single MP referred again to what he said. We are dealing here with real evil.

* On Friday, Vicky Haigh, the mother I wrote about two weeks ago, was released early from prison. A very odd story, of which more next week.